In the past, workers relied on relatively few applications running on a desktop computer. These applications tended to grow increasingly large and complex in response to the ever-increasing competition to provide additional functionality. Application vendors strived to become the common interface under which users could perform a broad range of tasks. With the success of the Internet, that trend began to reverse and today one tends to rely on many more independent or loosely coupled applications. In many cases these applications are provided by multiple vendors and hosted across multiple servers.
Managing passwords is a big problem for organizations. According to the research analysis firm Gartner, 40 percent of all help desk calls are for forgotten or expired passwords. That results in a high administrative cost to the help desk and, more importantly, a substantial amount of user downtime and lost productivity when people are locked out of their systems. It is even possible for a single agent entering a wrong password to lock out an entire call center for a specific partner website that uses an agency (not agent-specific) authentication approach.
Some prior art approaches to solving this problem include requiring multiple accounts and complex passwords; however, experts note that some agents invariably write their passwords on sticky notes and place them on the bottom of their keyboards or elsewhere near their computers. Other attempts to solve the password problems employ HTTP command-line scripting tools such as wget, cURL, lynx and expect. While these enjoyed limited success for some websites, it was clear that an approach was needed that could provide far more capabilities.
Another problem common in agent applications is that entering data elements multiple times becomes tedious. Prior art helper applications such as BonziBUDDY and Gator aimed at solving this problem by remembering data fields and automatically populating forms for the consumer. Unfortunately, most of these applications soon became classified as malware, as they carried out other functions (such as sending back data to a reporting server) that the consumer may not have realized when installing the application. More recently, several browsers such as Internet Explorer have begun to offer some form-filling operations. However, these browser applications are limited in that they only collect data that the user entered once, and then they pre-fill it when they find a field with exactly the same name.
Yet another problem in agent applications is that employees sometimes misuse their free access to the Internet. Internet filtering and web security solutions such as NetNanny and WebSense provide some capabilities to selectively allow access to known safe sites or to limit the time agents are allowed to spend on various categories of sites. However, it may also be desirable to modify the site content before rendering it in the user's browser, and to either strip or log the data submitted from a user's browser before passing it along to a web site. These prior art approaches do not provide such abilities.
Other related prior art approaches and technologies are disclosed in U.S. Patent Pub. No. 2006178918, U.S. Pat. No. 6,742,015, U.S. Pat. No. 6,721,713, U.S. Pat. No. 6,473,794, U.S. Patent Pub. No. 20070038610, U.S. Pat. No. 6,789,189, U.S. Patent Pub. No. 20020055351, U.S. Patent Pub. No. 20060095568. However, none of these references satisfactorily addresses the problems noted above among others.